A. Scott Berg, Wilson

Wilson: the last openly racist U.S. president.

Woodrow Wilson’s rise to president of the
U.S. was as meteoric and improbable as Barack Obama’s a century later.
Within a decade of becoming president of Princeton University, Wilson
“left politics,” as he liked to quip, to be elected governor of New
Jersey and then president of the United States. But that rise, as told
in A. Scott Berg’s new biography, Wilson (Putnam, 832 pages, $40), also concealed a squandered opportunity.

Born and raised in
four Southern states, the 28th president was a son of the Confederacy
who struggled to transcend his racist heritage. A brilliant orator, he
couldn’t muster the courage even to mention race in a nation that was
then lynching blacks on a weekly basis. Instead, Wilson told “colored”
jokes throughout his life, often in black dialect, without
embarrassment. Almost his entire Cabinet were Southern segregationists,
including his postmaster general, at a time when the postal service was
the single largest employer of blacks in the country.

Measuring
historic figures by modern standards is always tricky, and Berg treats
Wilson’s racism evenhandedly, trying to put it in context by noting he
was “fairly centrist” in his racial beliefs. He’s right, Wilson’s racial
attitudes were no more or less enlightened than those of any ordinary
American in the early 20th century.

But then, as Berg’s
book shows, Wilson was no ordinary American. As a political science
professor and then university president, he stood up to wealthy alumni
to transform Princeton from a rich man’s country club into a national
model of higher learning. As New Jersey governor, he turned the tables
on the political machine that put him in office to pass the most
progressive election and civil-service reforms in the country. As U.S.
president, he established the Federal Reserve, named the first Jewish
justice to the Supreme Court, led the nation through its first world war
and created the League of Nations, spiritual forerunner to the U.N.

In
addition to Wilson’s political career, Berg’s biography reveals an
intensely passionate man who overcame the grief of his first wife’s
death to woo and wed a widow 20 years his junior. She became virtually
the nation’s first woman president after he suffered a debilitating
stroke. The greater tragedy is that a president who led the nation to
war to make the world safe for democracy could not bring himself to make
the nation safe for diversity.